3:AM Magazine

By Max Dunbar.

What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us?, Francis Beckett, Biteback 2010

Before beginning this piece I promised myself that I would not use The Who’s ‘Talking About My Generation’ line as my title, or quote Larkin on the sixties (’Sexual intercourse began in 1963/Which was rather late for me’ etc) although I note with annoyance that Ed Howker and Shiv Malik have beaten me to a good title with their Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth, presumably named in tribute to the classic 1995 Prodigy album.

Although Francis Beckett has many insights into what happened between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, his reflexive and wearying anti-Americanism prevents him from seeing that the US hippie movement had something to fight for. American baby boomers grew up in the country of Pat Robertson and Jim Crow, a society of entrenched inequality and racism led by a bigoted maniac. American hippies protested against a government that fed its young to a pointless and unwinnable war and a police force that opened fire on dissidents in the streets.

The situation in the UK was very different. Peter Hitchens remembers going on an antiwar demo in Grosvenor Square: ‘I am pretty certain I carried a North Vietnamese flag and that I joined in with the moronic chant ‘Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! We shall fight and we shall win!” By this point, universal healthcare and education had been achieved by reformist Labour politicians, who also dismantled the British empire. The previous year had seen the legalisation of abortion, a Family Planning Act that allowed councils to provide contraception, and Leo Abse’s landmark bill that decriminalised homosexuality. Laws against racial discrimination would follow in the 1970s. Harold Wilson kept the UK out of Vietnam despite considerable pressure from the Americans.

With pretty much every good cause already achieved by quiet, hardworking liberal-left politicians, the UK hippie movement became a self-sustaining circle of promiscuous exhibitionists, exploitative spiritual leaders and toytown revolutionaries who had been to the right schools, and lived in the better parts of London. It never produced leaders along the lines of Dr King, poets to compare to Ferlinghetti or Ginsberg or Wallace, musicians like the Doors or the Jefferson Airplane or writers as good as Ken Kesey or Hunter S Thompson. Today Britain’s ex-hippies look back with a kind of nostalgic disgust. Hitchens: ‘I wasn’t oppressed, deprived, abused, underprivileged, poor or any of the other things people give as justifications for this sort of oafishness. I had no excuse then, and offer none now. I was a self-righteous, arrogant, spoiled teenage prig’.

And yet the baby boomers retained the spirit of ‘68 well into their age and guile. In his 2002 film The Century of the Self, Adam Curtis argued that the rise of Thatcherism and freemarket dogma was a logical conclusion to the freewheeling hippie era; Michel Houellebecq wrote that ‘the ’sexual revolution’ is usually portrayed as a communist utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the rise of the individual.’ Here Beckett can’t help going over old ground. Communist and Trotskyite NUS activists grew up into New Labour politicians, and though often portrayed as sellouts, the rhetoric of those politicians bore the same dialetical rhythms. A few - Callinicos, German, Cliff - resisted official positions of power. Even today you see the sects of these old men and women, hanging around campus like vultures and vampires, attempting to channel the passion and energy of the young into their discredited and dead-end politics.

Although business gurus replaced the Maharishi, the ‘68 generation did not entirely forget its junk spirituality. It forced faith schools and publicly funded alternative health treatments on a bemused and increasingly irreligious public. Dr Karol Sikora is the textbook baby boomer. He leads Doctors for Reform, a pro-market pressure group, has founded a private healthcare company and teamed up with the American right in its campaign against Obama’s healthcare reform. He was also a Foundation Fellow of Prince Charles’s Foundation for Integrated Health, a tireless advocacy service for state-subsidised quackery until it closed this April amid allegations of fraud, money laundering and misuse of its charitable status.

A baby boomer himself, Beckett contemplates a legacy of ladders kicked away. The baby boomers grew up in a universal welfare state and have left it rotting from the inside with consultants and internal markets. They enjoyed a grant-subsidised university education and then introduced crippling tuition fees that closed off the student experience to working-class people. They graduated into a cheap and plentiful housing market and left a country where even to rent is so extortionate that almost a third of young men live at home well into their thirties. They came of age in a social democratic consensus that delivered both prosperity and redistribution, and left a doctrinaire freemarket economy followed by global recession that has hit the young hardest. They experienced an era of free love and hedonism, and left a culture of smoking bans, hectoring bishops and unit counts.

Beckett’s mother once told him that ‘the sixties generation acted as though it had invented sex.’ She meant that there had been plenty of wild times in the war years and before. But Beckett’s generation suffered a chronocentric delusion that they had found the be and end all of living to the full; and in their declining years, they denounced the binge drinking and promiscuity of today’s youth. ”We became puritans when we got too old to be libertines,’ Beckett admits. ‘We are like Lord Hailsham at the time of the Profumo affair, condemning sins we are no longer up to committing.’

If the 1960s onwards was a period of prolonged liberalism, maybe we’re on the verge of a new contraction that will begin a long age of austerity and repression. The signs are bad: rocketing inequality, fewer and less secure jobs, clerics being taken seriously. Britain feels like a mean, miserable country where everyone’s licking up and kicking down. You tremble for the future of the class of ‘10, who will need strong will and thick skins to get through the dark and troubled times ahead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He is reviews editor of 3:AM.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, September 6th, 2010.